August 6, 2008
Dear Everyone:
Back when we were in Building E the
Document
Management System Support people were in the same big room with us.
(We’re Information Management Consulting, they’re IM Products.)
Now that we’re in Building G, they’re on the other side of the
building. So we don’t see as
much of each other as we used to.
Last night, I encountered one of them on the way to
the parking lot after work.
I mentioned that I was no longer on the GIL 3 project.
Her response: “Yeah,
they’re all dropping off now.”
By “they” she meant the people who have anything to do with
Information Management.
The Powers That Be have finally admitted that GIL 3
is not going to be able to “force” people to use good Information
Management practices without their even knowing it’s happening and so,
Information Management has been kicked to the curb.
Again.
However, for my IM Consulting group this is
starting to look like a good thing.
As people realize that GIL 3 is not going to magically solve all
their problems, they’re coming to us for help.
There’s the new
Joint Venture (JV) company that was
formed with the giant paper products company to make
ethanol out of
waste vegetation or, at least, not out of food products like corn.
They’re just starting out and asked for help setting up their
Information Management program.
They asked me for copies of the Company’s policies.
I checked with Governance first to make sure it was
really OK to do this. As the
requisite non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements were in place
before we could even talk with these people, I was assured that it would
be all right. Then I got to
work.
Because just about everything is out on the
“intranet” (that’s the Company’s internal “internet”), I could access
all of the corporation’s policies.
It was a time-consuming, but relatively simple task to copy and
paste each policy into a Word document.
By the time I was finished, the document was 143 pages long.
But I wasn’t finished.
Almost every policy referenced other policies, plus other web
pages with secondary and even tertiary information.
Obviously the JV people wouldn’t be able to follow a link into
the Company’s internal network, so those web pages had to be copied to
additional documents. That
added up to a lot of “see separate document ‘abc.doc’.” documents.
When the Company contact on our side of the “wall”
called on Monday to ask when the policies would be ready, I told him
another day or so. It was
only later that I realized they probably thought I was just sending them
the policies that relate to Information Management.
If that’s the case, they’re in for a surprise.
Our email system doesn’t allow attachments larger
than about 3 megabytes. Even
with zipping the documents (compressing to a smaller size, then
decompressing them to normal size at the other end) I ended up sending
eleven messages, each with one zip file to transfer all the
documentation that went with all of the policies.
Next step:
The entire company-wide
Retention Schedule.
I figure I have a few days while they climb the mountain of
policy-related documents.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |